BLACK POWER!

It was a phrase that consumed the American imagination in the 1960s and 70s and inspired a new agenda for black freedom. Dynamic and transformational, the black power movement embodied more than media stereotypes of gun-toting, dashiki-wearing black radicals; the movement opened new paths to equality through political and economic empowerment.

In Harambee City, Nishani Frazier chronicles the rise and fall of black power within the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) by exploring the powerful influence of the Cleveland CORE chapter. Frazier explores the ways that black Clevelanders began to espouse black power ideals including black institution building, self-help, and self-defense. These ideals challenged CORE’s philosophy of interracial brotherhood and nonviolent direct action, spawning ideological ambiguities in the Cleveland chapter. Later, as Cleveland CORE members rose to national prominence in the organization, they advocated an open embrace of black power and encouraged national CORE to develop a notion of black community uplift that emphasized economic populism over political engagement. Not surprisingly, these new empowerment strategies found acceptance in Cleveland.

By providing an understanding of the tensions between black power and the mainstream civil rights movement as they manifested themselves as  both local and national forces, Harambee City sheds new light on how CORE became one of the most dynamic civil rights organizations in the black power era.

Louis Bromfield, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, established one of the most significant homesteads in Ohio on his Malabar Farm. Today it receives thousands of visitors a year from all over the world; once the site of the wedding of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, it was a successful prototype of experimental and conservation farming.

This lively, outspoken, and affectionate memoir preserves all things Louis Bromfield fought for or against in a life marked by surging vitality and gusto. He came from an Ohio family whose roots were in the land before the land was lost. He had his father's love of the land, and from his willful mother a hunger to know the world. From the New York City of theaters, concerts, parties, and novels, and a life in France that his success allowed, he finally returned to Ohio and established a new order for his family and friends, and for his followers, a new orbit into which they were drawn.

Ellen Bromfield Geld wrote a memoir of the man who was Louis Bromfield, father and friend, tyrant and “Boss,” alive always to whatever was worth responding to in people and in places, yet complex and lonely as a writer must essentially be to work at his craft. Now revived in paperback thirty-five years after its first publication, The Heritage remains a moving tribute and the recreation of a remarkable human being.

Early in this century, growing cities seeking to promote their communities came to view the budding local football team as an agent of civic progress and took the necessary measures to see that their interests were ably represented. As a result, semiprofessional clubs such as the Ironton Tanks and the Portsmouth Spartans faced off against such legendary teams as the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers. Towns scrambled to raise subscription dollars to build new stadiums, buy contracts for prospective stars, and finance the many road trips. Capturing the local color of a region as well as the spirited charm of a sport as it came into its own—before the rules were formalized and the teams so strongly established—Carl Becker documents a rare time in American history when ideals were being formed and broken and the promise for greatness seemed just within reach of all who tried to grasp it. Home and Away is a unique chronicle, more than just a history of the game of football, it is also an intimate study of how the citizens and organizations that made up these cities worked to put themselves on the map of an ever-shifting American landscape.

Early in this century, growing cities seeking to promote their communities came to view the budding local football team as an agent of civic progress and took the necessary measures to see that their interests were ably represented. As a result, semiprofessional clubs such as the Ironton Tanks and the Portsmouth Spartans faced off against such legendary teams as the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers. Towns scrambled to raise subscription dollars to build new stadiums, buy contracts for prospective stars, and finance the many road trips. Capturing the local color of a region as well as the spirited charm of a sport as it came into its own—before the rules were formalized and the teams so strongly established—Carl Becker documents a rare time in American history when ideals were being formed and broken and the promise for greatness seemed just within reach of all who tried to grasp it. Home and Away is a unique chronicle, more than just a history of the game of football, it is also an intimate study of how the citizens and organizations that made up these cities worked to put themselves on the map of an ever-shifting American landscape.

Carl Lavin was a high school senior when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The Canton, Ohio, native was eighteen when he enlisted, a decision that would take him with the US Army from training across the United States and Britain to combat with the 84th Infantry Division in the Battle of the Bulge. Home Front to Battlefront is the tale of a foot soldier who finds himself thrust into a world where he and his unit grapple with the horrors of combat, the idiocies of bureaucracy, and the oddities of life back home—all in the same day. The book is based on Carl’s personal letters, his recollections and those of the people he served beside, official military history, private papers, and more.

Home Front to Battlefront contributes the rich details of one soldier’s experience to the broader literature on World War II. Lavin’s adventures, in turn disarming and sobering, will appeal to general readers, veterans, educators, and students of the war. As a history, the book offers insight into the wartime career of a Jewish Ohioan in the military, from enlistment to training through overseas deployment. As a biography, it reflects the emotions and the role of the individual in a total war effort that is all too often thought of as a machine war in which human soldiers were merely interchangeable cogs.

This chronologically selected anthology of fiction by eight Ohio women makes accessible a literary tradition that begins with lost aspects of frontier life in the 1830s depicted by contemporaries Julia L. Dumont and Pamilla W. Ball. It ends with Jessie Brown Pounds’s retrospective recreation of the Western Reserve’s frontier culture at the century’s close.